Brief Summary Of Wild By Cheryl Strayed

The book “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed is a story about the author herself, and how she walks the Pacific Crest Trail. The trail goes from the border of Mexico all the way to the border of Canada. Her journey into the wilderness was led due to the fact that she lost her mother to cancer. She watched her family and siblings fall apart and even divorced her husband. In the four years between the death of her mother and the start of her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed traveled all over the country. The morning she began her hike, Strayed put on her hiking outfit then she opened the compartments of her pack and looked over her belongings. These items included a sleeping bag, a camp chair, a water purifier, a stove, a tarp, a first-aid kit, and other necessities.

The bag was so difficult to carry that Strayed could barely get it on her back. Strayed walked to a nearby gas station, where she tried to hitch a ride to the Pacific Crest Trail. She observed a lot of people but everyone had a full car or she feared might be rapists. Finally she had the guts to ask two men traveling in a minivan for a ride. She began to walk and within 40 minutes she was already regretting it. The backpack was so heavy she could barely tolerate it. Hiking on a trail was so much different then what Cheryl expected six months earlier when she decided to go on the journey for real. She was driving with her friend Aimee when Cheryl first saw the Pacific Crest Trail guidebook. That same trip, she had discovered she was pregnant and decided to have an abortion. The father of the child was Joe, a man she had met the last summer in Oregon. Joe introduced Cheryl to heroin and she moved in with him right away. That summer she began using heroin on the daily until her friend Lisa confronted her about it. Her ex-husband Paul drove all the way to Oregon just to try to talk her out of doing heroin